A vote against 3 primaries

Our opinion: The state Legislature can’t do what’s required to avoid extra elections. How many voters will want to go to the polls three times, just for the primaries?

Where else but New York would primary elections on three different dates next year be so much as a remote possibility? In what other state would that scenario be anything other than a bad joke?

Election laws continue to bring out the farcical side of our state government. Follow along, if you can — even if a straight face quickly gives way to exasperation. The dysfunction of New York is alive and menacing.

The problems begin, perhaps, with the fact that New York’s primary elections are too late in the year — in September, well past almost every state’s. The problem is exacerbated in a year like 2012, when the offices up for election include the U.S. House and Senate.

Federal law says that voters serving overseas in the military have to be get their ballots in the mail 45 days before the general election in November. That would be some trick for New York to comply, when primaries aren’t even held until September. It’s not unusual for some boards of elections to take until close to October to finalize the November ballots.

So, then, move back the primaries? To no later than Aug. 18, say — as the U.S. Justice Department has called for in a lawsuit against the state?

Anyone, even federal prosecutors, making such a reasonable suggestion runs the risk of being taken for a naive newcomer to New York politics.

August primaries for the House and Senate, you see, just don’t accommodate a hapless state Legislature that continues to fumble its responsibilities for scheduling its own elections. Next year, remember, those elections have to reflect new, post-2010 census districts drawn up by, who else, the Legislature.

That’s a much-abused power that the Legislature should have surrendered to an independent commission by now.

Instead, it’s telling an understandably unsympathetic federal government that census data that wasn’t available until late March made completing a redistricting plan in time for a primary before September impossible.

Please.

House and Senate primaries in August, with legislative primaries the next month? Talk about confusing voters. And very likely holding down the turnout, too.

Oh, and 2012 is a presidential election year, too. That means a primary to designate New York’s preference for the Republican nomination, and elect convention delegates. As of now, that will be April 12 — probably too late to much matter, too.

What matters instead is that New York continues to stand out as the state that doesn’t get it. It was the last state to fully comply with the Help America Vote Act, the federal election reform law made necessary by the circus surrounding the 2000 presidential election. It already had to get a waiver so the 2010 congressional primaries could be held without regard to the law respecting the voting rights of overseas military personnel. Now this.

Why not one primary election — for President, Congress and the Legislature? Or two at the most. The earlier the better.

Three primary elections would be three more reasons for embarrassment for a state that seems to thrive on it.